BLOG 4/25/13. THE CHURCH: THINKING OUT OF THE PAST, INTO THE FUTURE
This Blog’s designation comes from a book of mine entitled: Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church. When I gave the book that title, one of my most cherished older friends was a bit uncertain that enchanted was appropriate, and I appreciated her rationale. On the other hand, Paul describes the church as the dwelling place of God by the Holy Spirit, and any human community inhabited by the Holy Spirit cannot be comprehended as any kind of a humanly explainable phenomenon. It is enchanted.
In the church’s early incarnation it certainly was that. It was outlawed, it was persecuted, it had no prestige, its message was the totally outrageous one of God becoming human, and then being executed as a criminal by the Roman empire—but even more outrageous was that this God-man was raised from the dead. All of that unlikely beginning and yet the church grew spontaneously and exponentially and soon was a most influential presence in the empire.
It was totally unexplainable in merely human terms. It had none of the accouterments of the religions of the world at that time. It had no sacred buildings. It had no sacralized priesthood. It had no wealth or power. What it had was a dynamic sense of its calling by Jesus Christ to be the community that was a demonstration of his New Creation (Kingdom of God). And it had the indwelling presence of God the Holy Spirit, empowering, gifting, communicating, recreating, and enabling the church to accomplish goals, which were impossible by merely human means.
The church had always before it the compelling raison d’être, namely, that it was the agent of God to get his gospel of the Kingdom to every kindred and tribe and ethnic entity in the world.
It grew exponentially with all of those merely human handicaps, and the impossible task of making disciples of all peoples on the globe. In those dynamic early generations every member was equipped to be, not only mature in the image of Christ, but to be engaged actively in its missionary growth (cf. Ephesians 4). In Acts we get the repetitive reminder that the word went everywhere. The word ran and had free course. Spontaneous growth, organic growth, church plants in faraway places.
What happened to all of that?
Within a few generations, it became forgetful and reverted to patterns of merely human religion. It consigned its “ministry” to a formalized clergy, which allowed the rank and file believers to be supportive, and observing, while being passive and not responsible for the mission. Yes, and too many want it to remain that way!
Forgetfulness. Subversion. Passivity. Dis-enchanted. Merely human religion became the norm: clergy, sanctuaries, choirs, liturgical rites … and all humanly explainable.
I want to summon up an exhortation which Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has offered us from Israel’s mandate when it entered the Promised Land. Those exiles, as they occupied their new home, were told to regularly “go back to the boundary” and remember who they were, and where they had come from, and what was their covenant responsibility. The church today desperately needs to go back to scriptures and rediscover its mission and its enchanted essence as given by the Spirit.
There is a new generational culture of pragmatic idealists arising who tend to be futurists, and are not all that willing to be content with a church which has forgotten its essence, and is “sinking in the quicksands of the past,” but are those who are intentional in being participatory in its enchanted life. The church not only needs to, but also must itself, “go back to the boundary” and refound itself on its true purpose, and with the Spirit-given gifts, and with the active participation of every baptized participant in the mission of God to the world.
This present culture is not at all impressed with forgetful religious Christianity, which contradicts its own reason for being. Rather they could get excited about what it might look like in 20/20!
